Reader:  Lori Nolen

Respondent:  Kathy Martin  

Enid Dame, “On the Road to Damascus, Maryland”

UA, 141

Biographical Information

  http://bridgesjournal.org/editors.html

Enid Dame:  I grew up in Beaver Falls, PA, a mountain milltown, in the 40s and early 50s. My parents were former radical labor activists who, throughout the 50s, were politically progressive and culturally Jewish. (My father taught a Sunday School class at the Beaver Falls Reform Temple.)

As there were few other Jews in our neighborhood or my school, I learned to live with a sense of outsiderness, of dual identity, participating in two (or more) communities at once, with a resulting necessity to balance the needs and demands of different value systems. This situation continued even when we moved to a Jewish community in Pittsburgh, for my family's values, politics and ways of expressing its Jewishness were not conventional.

From these experiences, I developed a life-long commitment to the outsider, the marginalized, the complex and contradictory, the possibility of an alternative culture which would encompass many varying strands of existence.

Course Objectives  

Immigrant Narrative:   

Stage 5 – Rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity

Literary Objectives:

2c – Third generation as “assimilated”

Cultural Objective:

2 – Effects of immigration and assimilation on American cultural units or identities, including family, generations, and gender.

Bedford Glossary Term:

Interpretive communities – (219) “A term used by reader-response critic Stanley Fish to acknowledge the existence of multiple and diverse reading groups within any large reading population.  Fish argues that the meaning of a given text may differ significantly from group to group.” 

As an academic course, we will apply course objectives and themes to our interpretation of the readings differently than that of someone reading leisurely or even another course with different objectives and themes.

Poem Vocabulary:

Ethical Culturist – Ethical Culture is a humanistic religious and educational movement inspired by the ideal that the supreme aim of human life is working to create a more humane society. - American Ethical Union  ( www.aeu.org)

What are the basic beliefs of Ethical Culture? (from www.ethicalstl.org)

·Freedom of Belief: When we stimulate our thinking with new insights, information, and inspirations, our understanding of the world evolves, and we realize the full capacity of our human spirit.

·Eliciting the Best: When we bring out the finest characteristics in others, we experience the best in ourselves.

·Respect for Human Worth: We treat all people as having an inherent capacity for fairness, kindness, and living ethically.

·Ethical Living: When we put into practice ethical principles such as love, justice, honesty, and forgiveness, we experience harmony within ourselves and in our relationships.

·Reverence for Life: We cultivate the spiritual dimension in life by experiencing our interdependent connections to humanity, nature, and our inner values.

This lyric poem accomplishes the concept of Assimilation with a bit of ambiguity to make connections to one’s own experiences which may be limited through a more detailed prose narrative.

Interpretation

Enid Dame’s poem is a first person narrative written in free verse.  Andrea Perkins’ 2002 presentation acknowledges two main points of reference in this poem.  The title is a play on the Biblical story title of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, Syria.  Saul, a Jew, was trying to convert Christians until he converted to Christianity and became Paul.   The second point of reference is Damascus, Maryland.  This town serves as a crossroad, connecting several rural areas.  Influences from the various and diverse cultures meet at these crossroads, leaving those influences to the people who visit.  From the crossroads, one can travel to a new direction, a new place.

The poems centers on a 35 year-old woman’s mental journey reflecting on all of the names or labels she has held.  Traveling to Damascus, she has a vision of herself converting into someone else.  This transformation is similar to Saul’s in that her transformation will propel her further into assimilating to America’s New World values and away from the Old World values.  And once she has changed, she can never go back fully to these old values.  She can feel herself changing, but into whom or what she does not know. 

Her parents are worried that she still has not decided who she is because of the generational gaps and traditional expectations.  By American standards, this character is successful in career (teaching), philosophy (Ethical Culturist), heritage (Jew), and early familial roles (nice girl and bread baker).  However, it can easily be assumed that the parents are worried because, at 35, “wife” and “mother” are not on the list.  She is relieved when they change the subject and she can begin again to follow her American dream of becoming anything she may add to her growing list. 

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you think this poem only applies to one culture?  What if the line “A New York Jew” was eliminated from the poem?

2. The 2002 class commented that the character is suffering from an identity crisis and that her parents need to be worried.  Do you see this poem as a reflection of identity crisis or a person assimilating?

3. The list of names is reflective, starting with the most recent and working back to when she was a little girl.  Can these roles be identified as a continual evolution, each building on the last?

Additional Ideas for possible discussion, if needed:

The names she uses can show the Immigrant Narrative stages, although she is continually changing, assimilating.

Stage 1 – Leave the Old World:  Learns the role of “a nice girl in knee socks and “a barefoot breadbaker”.  The traditional roles for girls and young women.  Evolves from these traditional roles.

Stage 2 – Journey to the New World:  (Implied)  Education.  American dream to become whatever she wants to be.

Stage 3 – Shock, resistance, exploitation, and discrimination:  Becomes an Ethical Culturist, believing in human worth and harmony of all people.  This could be a possible reaction to discrimination and “outsiderness” of being a Jewish minority.

Stage 4 – Assimilation to dominant American culture and loss of ethnic identity:  A radical teacher.  “Radical” used in the nontraditional sense, teaching beliefs that may seem extreme or unusual and not following all the traditional rules (of thought), which is a loss of “Old World” identity and patriarchal rules.

Stage 5 – Rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity:  A New York Jew.  Rediscovery of Jewish heritage and ethnicity, but only partially.  There is a distinction that she is a New York Jew.